It’s not about the ads to buy things. That’s part of it for sure, but it’s more than that.

Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc. want your data, your habits, routines, opinions, etc, so they can influence the way you think and behave and understand the world.

There’s a clip I saw recently of Peter Thiel saying they could never get people to vote for the things they want to do, so instead they are using technology to change things.

Even if you block ads, if you still use platforms owned by tech mega-corps, they have your data. Sure you might not see the targeted ads, and so you think you’re coming out ahead, but you don’t realize that every piece of content you see between the ads you’ve blocked is being filtered to influence the way you think about the world.

That’s awesome, I never knew that! And someone made a similar tool for Linux as well

I watched Jurassic Park again the other day.

“It’s a Unix system, I know this!”

Nedry had a very custom window manager.

I miss the old tts voices and now everything is ai generated garbage :( Bring back the robot voices!

That’s why we use JavaScript on the front end, JavaScript on the back end, and you can streamline it even more by using JavaScript for the db layer too. After all, if you have too much data to be reasonably parsed in a single .json file, you are probably just architecting wrong.

This is beautiful

You have the r and n flipped: userjourneys.ai

Nah, we’ll just SELECT * from both tables and loop through the arrays in JavaScript to associate the records.

I love the magic system in Genesys, with just basic spells (attack, heal, augment, curse, etc), some varying effects with suggested flavor (e.g. “Ice” adds ensnare to an attack, but mechanically it doesn’t matter if it is vines, goop, whatever), and how much that effect increases spell difficulty. It lets the players go into a brainstorming session trying to come up with a spell to get out of a very specific situation, and having the game support almost anything.

E.g. this create water idea could be an attack spell with the poisonous quality (making it a hard check), which requires the target to make a hard resilience check or take a bunch of extra damage and strain, which for a skilled mage against a non-boss creature (e.g. an overly ambitious bandit) is well within one-shot range. If they pass the check, they would still take damage from the attack, but would be able to cough up most of the water before it got too serious.

This system sounds very cool also, and I have recently heard of Mage in another thread. I would like to play a system that gives players the ability to come up with spells that the GM doesn’t know ahead of time (I seriously dislike long lists of predefined spells), but also has a little more of that hard magic-science set of rules to satisfy my inner Sanderson fanboy. I have built in some external scaffolding around the magic in my Genesys setting that does this, and it has been a ton of fun so far.

My main gripe is that I wish I had more time to play RPGs (more than a couple sessions a month) so I could try out more systems.

That reminds me that I actually have the pdf of his book return of the lazy dm, I just haven’t finished it 😅

The parts I did read were extremely helpful and I am definitely going to finish it and incorporate that into my prep. Thank you!

It’s beautiful <3

I do that too 😅 I’m getting better at avoiding the scary trigger words and getting them to agree with the principles

Good points! There are definitely limits to this.

Foreshadowing is something I have tried to do and would like to do more of. My current campaign and the only long running one I have experience with is all homebrew, and we did start at a place where I had the world itself pretty well fleshed out, but a lot of the character and faction stuff changed quite a bit over the first couple of months. The big changes were early enough that it didn’t really cause problems for our table, but I have experienced what you say, where some of the foreshadowing that I tried to do in the first couple of sessions kind of became irrelevant. This was mainly because I realized the thing I was originally intending to foreshadow wasn’t that interesting and needed to change as the players began living in the world. We are at a place now where the players have mostly uncovered all of the key lore, and I believe they will confront the BBEG soon.

I have learned a lot running this game and it makes me excited to build and run more!

I’m the guy but instead of a pyramid scheme I’m just trying to get all of my friends to install Linux and switch to fediverse social platforms